On Pragmatic Translation From The Perspective Of Functional Translation Theory

With the rapid development of the Chinese society and economy, and the further deepening of the opening and reforming, there are more and more opportunities for the communication between the Chinese and overseas people. Consequently, the pragmatic texts translation has played an increasingly significant role in the international communication. It's true that the languages in pragmatic texts are characterized by concretion, accuracy, briefness, popularity and vividness, and thus, the pragmatic translation in turn should embody these characteristics. Pragmatic translation aims to send the information to the readers and meanwhile, to emphasize the actual transformative effect. To a large extent, it characterizes in its attributes of practicality, reality and wide use, which covers political, economic, social and cultural areas, and also has practical and even material function. Undoubtedly, the cultural, ideological and linguistic differences are posing difficulties for pragmatic translation, and mistranslations are often seen in the pragmatic translation in China's present publication and mass media. Therefore, we say that the study on pragmatic translation is far from satisfactory to its need, and the traditional translation theories seem increasingly inadequate, which means that a comprehensive and potent guiding theory is apparently needed.However, Chinese traditional translation theories can not satisfy the need of the pragmatic translation. From ancient to now, there are abundant fruits in translation researches in China, for instance, Yan Fu's"faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance", Lu Xun's"Rather be faithful than smooth", and Xu Yuanchong's notion of Rivalry, the notion of transcendence. However, what all these fruits focus are almost on literary translation and all the efforts are made to render perfect literary translation and to emphasize the unification of artistic and aesthetic values. Consequently, the pragmatic translation with the characteristics of complex contents, various patterns and distinct purposes has been less discussed, keeping a kind of embarrassed and ignored situation. Therefore, it is inappropriate and unrealistic to study the pragmatic translation within the conduction of literary translation theories.Functional translation theory mainly includes such theories as Skopos theory of German school, Newmark's text typology and Nida's functional equivalence, and these theorists all study the translation from the perspective of the function of languages and texts.Based on the functional translation theory, the thesis stresses the significant role of the division of text types and text functions on selecting strategies and approaches to pragmatic translation. In the thesis, a large number of translation cases for different texts, e.g. authoritative texts, tourism texts and technical texts, are carried out to probe into translation strategies and approaches. As to translation strategies, the author asserts the adoption of "domestication"in most cases. As to translation approaches, such key words are mentioned as diction, amplification, omission, conversion, repetition, inversion, negation, division, and etc. That is to say, different texts should be translated in different ways, and there is not the so called normalized translation. Therefore, in pragmatic translation practice, effective translation strategies and approaches can be utilized with the consideration for different text types, text functions, as well as the different commissions and purposes of translation, and the functional translation theory has provided the enlightenment and theoretical basis to such a study.